Don't panic! You don't need
to learn all the dates listed below. Just become familiar with what happened
during the five major time periods [i.e., The Early Time, The Middle
Ages, The Age of Discovery, The
Beginning of Voyaging forScience, and The Age
of Modern OceanographicExploration]. Also know the years covered by
these periods.

I. INTRODUCTION

A. Through the
centuries a series of inventions and
discoveries have made travel on the ocean faster and safer. Others have
permitted more efficient and detailed scientific studies.

B. A number of maps go far back into antiquity so that their existence is
often difficult to explain in terms of what historians have assumed about the
state of development of some ancient cultures. The information plotted on sea
charts was gained at great cost in time, money and lives, so these charts were
jealously guarded by each nation and not shared with foreign or untrustworthy captains.

C. The earliest "oceanographers"
were not scientists but were merely trying to improve their daily lives
through fishing, trading, migrating to more promising lands or just gaining a better
understanding of the oceanic processes that dominated their lives. Later
conquest of other cultures, enrichment of government treasuries, and
enhancement of political power became reasons to undertake sea-faring ventures.

II. CHRONOLOGY OF IMPORTANT MARINE INVENTIONS,
ADVANCES IN CARTOGRAPHY, GREAT VOYAGES AND DISCOVERIES:

A. The Early Time- until about 150 A.D.

1. 7250 BC - Earliest recorded
sea voyage took place in the Aegean, butearly human migrations argue for
extensive seafaring as early as 10,000 years ago.

2. 4500 BC - Oldest known
map = Babylonian clay tablet although historians suspect maps were being drawn
as long as 10,000 years before that.

3. 4000-2000 BC - Polynesians traveled
extensively in the Western Pacific settling many islands in that region (Figure
1.5 and Box 1.2)

4. 2500 BC - First known charts made by
Babylonians

5. 1500-500 BC - Premier shipbuilders, sailors, and
traders of the ancient world were the PHOENICIANS. Conquered
the world with commerce rather than warfare. Made sea charts starting in
about 1200 BC, were masters of celestial navigation, traveled to Africa and
England. Left us an undeniable legacy because with their
naval genius Greeks, not Persians,
came to power in the ancient world.

1. Thegreat age of
ocean exploration began in the late 15th century encouraged by a number of
factors:

a. Prince Henry
the Navigator, fascinated by the sea, leads Portugal's pioneering efforts in
the Atlantic

b. 3-masted ships
recently developed and improved

c. the need to
replace the ancient overland trade routes to the Orient which were severed by
hostile Islamic cultures at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

d. the rediscovery
of Ptolemy's map

2. 1492 - First globe
showing Asia facing Europe across an Atlantic ocean only 126o of
longitude in width.

a. The actual distance from western Europe to eastern Asia is more than 200o
of longitude, and obviously this globemaker didn't
know about the Americas.

3. 1492 - Columbus sails to the Bahamas (Fig. 1.7 & Box 6.1)

4. 1498-1520 – other famous
explorers travel to the Pacific Ocean and the Americas (Vasco DaGama, Vespucci,
Balboa, Ponce de Leon)

5. Maps began to improve
after 1500 when compasses and better ships encouraged exploration and in 1529 a
Portuguese cartographer made the first world map to show the vastness of the
Pacific with India, China and the poles properly located.

6. 1842-1855 - Activities
& information gathering ofMatthewMaury
(USA) revolutionizes navigation & cuts weeks off transoceanic runs
by US clipperships. His book The Physical
Geography of the Sea was the first major oceanographic workin
English and he's called the Father of Oceanography.

7.1872-1876-HMS Challenger expedition traveled the
world's oceans to investigate everything about the sea. (Box 5.2) Represents
major turning point for ocean science.

8. 1893-1896 - Norwegian Nansen's Arctic voyages (Box 7.2)

9. 1895 - Diesel engine
and wireless telegraph invented

E.TheAge of Modern Oceanographic
Exploration (1900's and beyond)

1. 1917 - Echo-sounder (submarine detector, Figure 3.1) invented

2. Virtually all civilian
ocean research was suspended during WWII, but significant war-related
discoveries contributed greatly to later oceanographic exploration.